Marsala deserves to be liberated from store rooms – try some of this rich,
nutty wine, if you can find it

The floor is sandy and you can smell the dampness of sea air. The roof soars above us in a vast arc and the thick walls are made from huge blocks of stone. Even the wooden barrels, filled with wine, are so enormous their proportions seem closer to those of cooling towers than barriques, making me feel tiny, like Alice in Wonderland after swallowing the "Drink Me" potion.

And what's that over there? A case of old guns, lined up to attention along one wall. And a small cannon.

"Oh, they're rifles that once belonged to the soldiers who started the unification of Italy with Garibaldi," says our host at the Florio winery. We are in Sicily, of course: Marsala, to be precise, where Garibaldi landed in 1860 with just 1,000 troops, and went on to capture the rest of the island before crossing the straits of Messina and surging north.

No one drinks marsala any more. They buy it to make saltimbocca then put it in the cupboard and leave it to go stale.

"Marsala does not go stale," says the winemaker. "It lives forever because it is made in contact with the air, deliberately oxidative in style," – he shows us how some of the smaller barrels, laid on their sides, have their bungs at the end (rather than in the middle) of the concave curve so that when they are topped up (to replace the liquid that evaporates) they can never be completely filled. There is always some air left in the barrel.

I maintain that an open bottle does lose something after a year or so, but keep very quiet. This is not the time.

The Florios' first business was a pharmacy, but their empire diversified and grew. During the Belle Epoque they helped to fund the Teatro Massimo, Palermo's fabulous opera house (scene of the shootout in Godfather III). Then along came the First World War, Mussolini, the Crash; and they had to sell up (Florio is now owned by the Disaronno group – you may know its almondy liqueur).

But the founding family was a formidable marketeer in its day. When Garibaldi came back to Sicily in July 1862, Florio made a special cuvée with his name on it, thereby harvesting an automatic celebrity endorsement from the hero of the hour.

The fact that Florio now have a brand called Terre Arse – and that they are trying to sell it to English speakers (stop sniggering at the back) – might suggest, however, that their marketing genius has not lingered.

Marsala can be sweet or dry, pale or dark; rich and caramelised, or rasping and nutty. The cheaper sweet stuff is probably best kept for your saltimbocca; but there are some really lovely wines here. My favourite in the Florio range we tried was called Baglio Florio Vergine 1998. It reminded me a little bit of sherry – marsala has a lot to offer sherry fiends – it smelt of hazelnuts and walnuts toasting in the oven, had the grainy texture of panforte and a surprising, refreshing dryness. It also – this may be an even more cryptic tasting note than usual – feels as if it's about to smell of oranges but then doesn't quite.

Of course, it's not available in Britain – the ones I loved so often aren't – but the one a couple of steps down is: Terre Arse, Marsala Vergine DOC 2000 (£11.75 for 50cl greatwesternwine.co.uk).

Marsala is on the western edge of Sicily, a coastline that has been invaded by practically everyone over the centuries, latterly the English. John Woodhouse came here and more or less invented marsala in its current incarnation in 1770, then made its name by exporting it around Europe (Nelson, who held a dukedom in Sicily after helping out the Bourbon king during the Napoleonic Wars, was a fan).

Few Englishmen come to this relatively poor and unexplored side of Sicily today, but if you do venture here then look out for the wines from Marco de Bartoli – for my money not just the best marsalas in existence, but wines so good that they take this drink to another level.

The two I like best are his solera-aged (mixed from barrel to barrel, like sherry) 10-year-old Marsala Superiore NV, aged for at least 10 years in big oak casks, so smooth it seems polished, moving on castors across your tongue.

His most special wine is Vecchio Samperi Ventennale NV (£35 for 50cl, Les Caves de Pyrène,lescaves.co.uk) – an astonishing, exciting wine, close in style to what marsalas must have been like before 1770, filled with the taste of hazelnuts, and with so many corners and so much detail to look at.

The other discovery of my trip was that dry marsala goes gloriously well with bottarga (dried fish roe). Not exactly an everyday food – but its saltiness works fantastically with the nutty wine. Also, marsala that's rich but not too sweet is really fabulous with Gorgonzola – or "diet-buster" as a woman I used to work for once called it. But then, I don't believe in diets.